eMusic Review 0
In 1973, David Harrington was still an aimless artist-type with a vague sense of having something important to express — until late one night, when an epiphany arrived by radio. “You have to remember Vietnam and the feeling of hopelessness,” he says. “Suddenly on the radio there was this music that didn’t sound like anything I had grown up with, and it felt so right.”
The piece was George Crumb’s 1970 “Black Angels,” for electric string quartet: a gloomy, gritty, even nihilistic work full of furious sounds: Microphones attached to each instrument magnify every note and scrape, tremolos scurry everywhere, bows are drawn across gongs and the rims of crystal wine glasses filled with water. Crumb’s music is hallucinatory and pessimistic, but it is also gripping, theatrical and emotionally transparent, and Harrington immediately formed the Kronos Quartet to play it.
